Pomegranates and Other Words For Our Time
SIEGEL, DANNY
POMEGRANATES AND OTHER WORDS FOR OUR TIME DANNY SIEGEL Once again I am in Israel; once again I feel the thrill and burden of my annual immersion in the Hebrew language. Many Israelis compliment me...
...A couple of days ago a soldier described the ten truckloads a day that were being taken from a single storage space—and this was the eighth day of their heavy work...
...display of captured arms from Lebanon...
...Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more...
...Ayt" is from Isaiah, of course: "And they shall beat their swords into ittim [plural for "ayt"— ploughshares, spades] and their spears into pruning hooks...
...We were one chevrah—trite as it sounds—one Big Family, taken aback from the moment we saw the two signs at the entrance...
...Since our accents and outfits told them we were tourists, they were patient in explaining the terminology of death...
...The soldiers guarding the displays were friendly...
...Nun Tet" means "Neged Tankim"—anti-tank paraphernalia—and "Nun Mem" is for "NegedMetosim"—an anti-aircraft gun...
...For now, at least, both are apparently critical parts of the Jewish consciousness...
...Not to gloat, but to be exposed, to see, to be dumbfounded by it all...
...It looked like a digging instrument of some sort, probably for foxholes or anti-tank traps...
...Many Israelis compliment me on my vocabulary (if not my grammar), pointing out a nice Talmudic phrase now and then, admiring the exotic circumlocutions foreign to the world of street-Hebrew speakers...
...No, I was not surprised...
...She took us to the site of her future kibbutz for the retarded: 50 acres of land for sheep and chickens and crops, near a town called Rosh Ha'ayin...
...Sooner or later we would all see it: the Arabic edition of Mein Kampf...
...I do agree with her for the most part, being neither specifically conservative nor radical, but I do not want to drive wedges between us...
...One was a list of how many of each type of arms were captured (how many truckloads of this, how many artillery pieces, how many rounds of ammunition), and the other was a list, perhaps 15 items, of countries-of-ori-gin—guns from Brazil, North Korea, Libya, Russia (of course) and (of course) the United States...
...That, too, we knew...
...It's time for me to review yesterday's vocabulary— phrases and clauses and words I jotted down during the trip to Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan...
...The Big Family could see that easily from the exhibition, though we were told that only about five percent of the captured materiel was on display, and that, indeed, some types of weapons were not represented at all...
...From Hadassah I learn sad words, exotic medical terms, tales of suffering and clips of soaring ("zooming," if I only could remember the word) joy...
...There we would always have a rimon to celebrate the New Year...
...The morning was spent at Ma'on LaTinok, my friend Hadassah Levi's home for infants with Down's Syndrome...
...And her cousin...
...Makach" is a heavy machine gun...
...An international word...
...My head was filled with armor and land mines and big-millimeter shells and rockets, but something snapped...
...We should go—my friends and I—to see the Instruments of Destruction...
...I love Hadassah's work so much, admire her devotion...
...I have been up for over an hour, jogging, strolling, enjoying the Jerusalem morning before the traffic's gear-shifting rumble takes over...
...At first I did not conmuch artillery, so many bullets and guns, so readily available, so openhandedly offered...
...Still, I am not satisfied...
...Leaving the front gate of the exhibition grounds, I remembered where I had seen the word before...
...Yud Chef signifies the 18 blessings of the daily prayers...
...I am a poet and want to know words like "tricuspid valve" (I knew it once two years ago), "carbohydrate" (to read diet labels for my yearly weight loss program), "zoom," "dichotomy," "gerrymander" and even "cannibalism" (though I hardly know when I'll use that one...
...She interjects some memories of her brother—his part in the planning of Operation Entebbe, his laying out of many new defense roads, his anticipated appointment as head of the Mossad, and eventually Chief of Staff...
...So accents and mannerisms...
...for one well-known purpose...
...It's now a little after 7:00 a.m...
...Perhaps later, in a poem, six months from now, when the guns have stopped and the men have come home from The Wars...
...There were hundreds at the moment we arrived, though none of them seemed to be gloating either...
...It seems that half the country has come to offer her condolences at the Shivah and during the following days...
...and a display of captured documents—the orders to shell various settlements in the Galilee, instructions to induct 12-year-olds into the Forces of Liberation, passports from numerous countries, statements by Arafat that did not jibe with the enlightened grasp of Arafat held by many Western diplomats...
...There was one part of the display that caught my eye in particular: the rimonim...
...Towards the end of the visit, she tells us we really ought to go to the Exhibition Grounds in Tel Aviv, to see the Danny Siegel, author of (most recently) Gym Shoes and Irises, a book on personalized tz'dakah, is a contributing editor of moment...
...Thousands of others were there during the days of display...
...I was not surprised to see it there, but it was just one more thing, another item in the display...
...Tolar" is a re-coilless cannon...
...The layout was actually in two parts: the arms themselves— tanks, cannons with a range of 27 kilometers, troop carriers, machine guns, shoulder-held anti-tank missiles, rifles of every variety, shells of every size, dum-dum bullets and (of course) hundreds of Katyusha rockets, many still in their shipping cases marked "spare parts for tractors" (of course...
...Among all these, including the PLO maps of the targets for shelling and the pictures of the burned-out bus on the shore road, was Mei ? Kampf...
...The day before I saw them growing on a tree while on a walking tour of Canaanite and Davidic Jerusalem...
...And the love his soldiers felt for him...
...I was sorry that these kids, some of them less than half my age, knew so many of these words, so many abbreviations...
...It was a painful thought, a musing that merged history and lexicography...
...My Hebrew lesson was shattered...
...A rimon is (or so I thought) most commonly a pomegranate . . . delicious fruit of the Land, tricky to eat, impossible to wash out if it smears on a shirt...
...Stam" is a scribe who writes Torah scrolls, T'fillin and Mezuzot...
...But here, a rimon is something different...
...Many Rosh Hashanah memories came to mind, pleasant childhood recollections of near-seedy, small hotels in New Jersey, filled with grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, Europeans with their multifarious Yiddish nect the word with the thing it represented...
...Her brother, General Yekutiel Adam, was killed in Lebanon...
...Some I had almost forgotten by the next morning, because I hadn't written them down...
...it is a hand grenade...
...I stood silent and wondered if the dictionaries will change the order of meanings—"grenade" first, then "pomegranate...
...I keep thinking to myself, "I understand so little of politics, even with the help of my friends...
...Let us not talk politics, even if it turns out that we agree...
...I am too tired to make sublime analogies or thunderous conclusions...
...Each day we are told by the radio and the TV and the newspapers that more and more arsenal bunkers are being emptied...
...Hadassah is tired...
...It was a short word, "Aleph Tet," pronounced "ayt...
...A spade...
...Such different worlds...
...She talks very rapidly, and we have much business to do, so there is not much time, nor that much really new in her words...
...Her cousin, too...
...It was a difficult and extraordinary Hebrew lesson for me...
...I was exhausted and wanted only to return to Jerusalem, to shower, empty my mind, read a junky novel...
...You can have your choice: Korean, homemade Palestinian, anti-tank, anti-personnel, some with handles, some without...
...In my own history of Hebrew education, abbreviations were usually associated with talmudic terms: "Rashi" is Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki...
...Nagmash" is an armored troop carrier...
...What it all means I don't know...
...She is right, though...
...Mostly old, familiar words, except the story of her brother...
...I know most of her frame of reference from previous visits: welfare terms, sigh-ing-words, money terms ("overdraft," "interest payments"), nutrition and rehabilitation terms...
...His article, "The Uses of Forgetting," appeared in these pages in January-February 1982...
...Tet Nun Kuf spelled "tank...
...But there were many new abbreviations as well: "Nagmash," "Tolar," "Makach," "Nun Tet," "Nun Mem"—an awesome list to master...
...Still, there was one more item that caught my eye...
...Gimel" with a little line to the left, and a "Yud" and "Pay" spelled "jeep...
...But she continues, telling us how she shares the feeling with many other bereaved families that the military operation in Lebanon is justified, very important...
Vol. 7 • September 1982 • No. 8
